Greek Private Eye Novels

MIRA UK republished all three Mavros titles in May 2009. Crying Blue Murder has been published in Australia. The novels have also been translated into Norwegian, Swedish and Finnish.

The Alex Mavros novels currently form a trilogy. You can read about the genesis of each novel on its own page (use the links below), as well as find out much about my interest in Greece there. I’d just like to give a brief general introduction to the books here.

Crying Blue Murder | The Last Red Death | The Golden Silence | The Silver Stain

Having been closely involved with Greece one way or another since my childhood, I knew it was inevitable that I would write about the country and its people. In fact, the three unpublished novels I wrote during my ‘apprenticeship’ all contained significant elements about Greece, as do the Quint Dalrymple books. When I was finally unable to resist the urge to write novels set in Greece any longer, I wanted to do justice to the country, its long history and its staggering cultural achievements - as well as to bring out its dark side. This means that the Mavros books are not just private eye novels set in an exotic location - there are plenty, maybe too many, of those (though, fortunately for me, not many in Greece).

The books are my attempt to come to terms with the country that has been a major part of my life for decades. As a result, they cover subjects that some critics (though not many readers, as far as I can tell from your responses) think are too weighty for crime novels. I totally reject this form of literary snobbery. As many excellent contemporary novelists have shown (for example, Ian Rankin, George Pelecanos, Robert Wilson, John Connolly, Henning Mankell), the genre is capable of many and varied things. In fact, I believe that crime writers are more prepared to take on the big issues of the day (terrorism, child abuse, the drugs trade) than many so-called literary novelists. Anyway, enough of this rant about literary discrimination. The point is, I wanted to take the crime novel to places it hadn’t been before - and I don’t just mean geographically.

One of the crime series that I most admire is Michael Dibdin’s featuring the lugubrious Italian policeman Aurelio Zen. Amongst its many virtues is the way that Dibdin uses the series to pinpoint different areas of Italy and bring out their local politics and problems. Initially I thought I’d mirror this in the Mavros series, and indeed, I do change locations from book to book. But as I went on with the books, it turned out that each of them is a very different animal in other terms as well. Crying Blue Murder was an attempt to subvert the urban noir novel by setting a series of brutal crimes on a seemingly unspoiled island dotted with whitewashed houses. The Last Red Death covered the genealogy of terrorism, following the thread back to the Second World War - in fact, it’s more of a political thriller than a crime novel. And The Golden Silence is a take on the sub-genre of the gangster novel. All three books emphasise the importance of the past and of the family in Greece.

So there you have it. A trilogy of Greek crime novels. At the very least, it’s something different. And maybe Mavros will be back in the future. Maybe he’ll finally track down his long-lost brother Andonis.

January 2012 – well, look what’s happened. Alex Mavros returns after seven years! See this blog post I wrote for Shots and check The Silver Stain.